Fun & Dance. Cheer & Laughter. Every day you would get up and be excited by what the day could bring, maybe a snow day or start of summer vacation. The idea of being free to do whatever you choose, felt great.
You could swing by a friend’s house or go exploring in the woods whatever you fancied. You explored, you laughed, you jumped, and you laughed some more. Every day was greeted with fancy and wonder.
As you move through life, something starts to happen and your need for your inner child seems to dissipate. High school comes and everything gets serious. What are you going to do with your life? Are you going to go to college? If so, where?
Your inner child’s voice is left behind while you try to figure out your next step in life. Before you know it you have become an ‘adult’ and your inner child has become a faint whisper.
Your urge for rolling in the leaves or playing in the pool lessens and you spend most of your time focusing on the next prize instead of enjoying the gifts of that day through your inner child’s eyes.
Deep within you is the voice of your inner child. It holds all your childhood memories. The ones you cling to the most are the good ones of course. The good memories of my childhood make me feel warm inside.
But every now and then there is a rumbling of something just underneath the surface that happened when you were a child that you have been trying to keep buried inside.
Maybe it was the way you were treated or something you did or did not do. Whatever it is we all have something from our childhood we care not to remember.
I am no different. My little sister was stubborn and hot headed and so was my mother. This caused many arguments between them. Whenever they would start yelling at each other, I would go hide.
I was afraid to come out for fear that any leftover wrath would be placed upon me. I hid in any place I could find until the coast was clear.
This is not a childhood memory one wants to remember, there is nothing fun or funny about it. Remembering these memories hurt, so we push them down as far as they can go.
When you do this, you are pushing the anger, fear, shame, guilt, resentment, regret and jealousy of the memory deep down into the cells of your body.
Burying it deep inside is not the same thing as releasing it. Releasing it for good requires you to first acknowledge its existence. Then you must release the hurt surrounding it. Release it from every cell, blow it out and let your body exhale.
It’s been holding on to all that hurt just below the surface so that it can protect you from the heavy feelings it causes you. But it can only hold onto them for so long before symptoms of it manifest in the body.
As the arguments continued, I took it one step further and started to not just physically hide but mentally too. I discovered I could make up better stories in my head. I became a dedicated day dreamer and on top of the arguments, I grew 6 inches between 4th and 5th grade.
Now hiding was harder than it was before, instead I stood out like a sore thumb –5’8”, acne and braces. What could a girl do to get a break!?
My daydreaming slowly took over my life. I spend hours after school in a dream state where the world was happier, peaceful and more fun.
My parents never understood why I did it and honestly I didn’t know either but I knew one thing, I loved it! But then I graduated high school and I tried to stop spending as much time in a dream state but I could not so I shamefully hid it.
Your inner child holds all this inside. It’s like trying to hold your breath forever. You might be able to do it for a bit but eventually you need to take a new breath and in that little moment, something from underneath bubbles up to the surface, sadness, a memory, anger, etc.
You feel it and you may spend some time wallowing in it and then you snap back into reality and your body is back to holding its breath.
Your body does not want you to suffer. It wants you to have an awesome life and if that means it needs to give up some of its peace and serenity so you can have it consciously, it will do so but eventually a little breathe it not enough.
It needs a deep cleansing breath and in order to do that it must let out more of the pain. Every time this happens your body will show signs of this as a symptom, maybe a rash, pain or overwhelming sadness.
And eventually your body just can’t hold it in anymore and it all comes pouring out all at once. All of sudden, you feel like someone stole your rich fulfilling life and replaced it with a life of pain and suffering.
You do not have to suffer, you could instead recognize the memory inside that is causing you so much angst. Sit with it. Let all the emotion flow out of you, cry, and wail, let it out! Whatever feels good for you (outside of hurting someone or something) do it!
Those emotions you are holding in are eating you from the inside out. Emotions do not disappear, they must be expressed to be released.
I love my mother and sister and I have a pretty good relationship with them both now, but little did I know that the arguing and the resulting day dreaming escape time would still be affecting my life and my health 30 plus years later.
Every time my body has taken a breath since, a new symptom or healing crisis would surface.
First there was a DVT (blood clot) then an unrecognizable disease and then food allergies. I am sure I am missing a few but only in the last 6 months or so have I been able to grasp that I was basically torturing myself so I didn’t have to face and release those feelings that my inner child harbors deep within.
In the spring, I tripped walking and I slammed my chin on the sidewalk. I am thankful I did not bite my tongue or even break my jaw but it did leave me with a golf ball sized bump on my chin and a quarter size bruise and scrape. Besides my chin, I scraped my knees and legs.
Within a week my chin was completely healed but it took weeks for the other scrapes to heal. There are scars on my knees but there is no scar on my chin. How could the worst of it heal without an issue but the minor scrapes take so much time and leave a scar?
At this point, I realized that the healing energy that I was pulling in through my crown chakra during healing sessions was not making it down my whole body. It instead was getting blocked somewhere. Then just about 6 weeks later, I was diagnosed with another DVT.
My body was screaming for me to allow it to breathe so it could draw in new air to cleanse my body. But I still wasn’t ready to hear the truth that my inner child had to tell me.
Then I started to get this awful sensation in my mouth. It would not go away no matter what I did. I worked with healers and they would say that I was blocked in that area and that my root chakra needed some work. I did the work and some of my issues would get better and then they would reoccur.
I felt like I was in the never ending story, every time I thought I had it solved it would pop up again.
After 6 months of this, I had finally come to the point that I would do anything to figure out what was going on and after allowing myself to listen to my inner child, I discovered that all that arguing had taught me that it was unsafe to stay in my body.
This means that most of the time I am not grounded to mother earth. Instead I find comfort in meditation or being in a Theta state.
It is my home, it is where I find the most comfort. Now in order to get my health back, I have to release the anger, hurt, fear and guilt I have about those screaming matches so that I can get my health back and move on with my life.
So I ask you; what in your childhood have you tried to repress deep inside? What causes you pain and suffering when you think about being a child even for a second?
I know it is hard but your body wants to breathe, it doesn’t just want another small breath, it wants a big cleansing breath. But to do that, it needs to release that which is buried deep inside.
Are you ready to allow your body to breathe, to exhale all the heavy gunky feelings from your childhood? Your inner child has something to tell you but first and foremost it wants you to know that it loves you regardless of what you may or may not have done.
It longs for your attention. It wants to re-infuse the laughter, fun and freedom into your life that you once experienced as a child.
But to really embrace that part you, you must allow your inner child the time to heal from that which caused it pain. Start by remembering something from your childhood that puts a smile on your face.
Enjoy that for a moment. Then reach down inside and allow a childhood memory that needs to be healed rise to the surface. Recognize it and release the emotions tied to it.
Make peace with it and allow the happy feelings of the first memory lift your spirits. Work with your inner child until you have both have been able to process and release those emotions that you had pushed down so deep.
From here, you inner child will grow within you and you will start to see the world through the eyes of a child again filling you with wonder and laughter.
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Tami Reagor – Theta Healer
